


Yesterday's News

by The Hag (hagsrus)



Category: The Professionals
Genre: M/M, Older Lads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 02:37:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3233111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hagsrus/pseuds/The%20Hag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Teaandswissroll Weekly Obbo 261: newsagent (slightly revised)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yesterday's News

We're out of the habit of buying newspapers these days, what with the internet, but I stop at Patel & Gupta's to pick up a copy of the Times with an obituary of some old mate of Ray's that he wants to clip for his own eccentric reasons.

I find myself remembering the cramped little corner shop - J. Robinson, Newsagent and Tobacconist - where us kids went to buy comics that we swapped round. Beano and Eagle were my usual assignment. Later the American ones showed up, Batman and Superman, but ours were brought in from Australia for a while, black and white except for the covers, and in Superboy the o's in "Mom" were trimmed to be "Mum". I wonder what that job description was!

Cheap sweets - sherbet and liquorice and toffee things. Little bars of Cadbury's once they came off the ration.

Fireworks in November.

Ice cream. Fizzy drinks.

Those big boxes of chocolates, far beyond our aspirations.

J. Robinson, if that's who he was, kept us under grim surveillance, which spurred us on to plot strategies for pinching stuff, seldom executed.

The cards in the window. Sometimes we studied them, trying to spot coded advertisements for the illicit services we'd been assured appeared there, but nobody round our way offered anything so exotic as private French lessons. Daily Help at three-and-six an hour and second-hand bicycles and jobbing gardener wanted once a week didn't quite fit the bill.

As I leave the bright shop today with the Times under my arm I have a flash of another memory, years ago, crossing the road with a paper open to the racing results, and hearing the alarm sounding in my car.

A death averted, but the nightmares never quite cease.

Won't be all that long before we're among those obits, if anyone bothers. All part of yesterdays' news.

I go back to the shop and buy the biggest box of chocolates they have, a present for Ray's sister and the grandkids when we go on Sunday. Ray won't grudge me a few when she offers them round. Probably.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow...


End file.
